In December, we heard Apple was looking to buy 160-acres of land in Prineville, Oregon. The new mass of land was reportedly for hosting servers to power Apple’s iCloud, much like the $1 billion data center Apple owns in North Carolina.

Tonight, MacRumors points us to a KTVZ article confirming Apple has purchased the land in order to open up a large new data center…

Tech giant Apple Inc. confirmed Tuesday to NewsChannel 21 that it plans to build a data center at a 160-acre parcel in Prineville it just bought from Crook County for $5.6 million, a stone’s throw from the huge facility built by Facebook.

Cupertino-based Apple has reportedly purchased the 160-acre parcel of land for $5.6 million on February 15th, to build their new data center. Apple’s new piece of land isn’t very far from one of Facebook’s large data centers.

The data center will most likely serve the duty of helping to power Apple’s iCloud service, along with other services. Apple also hosts much smaller data centers in many parts of California.

Data centers aren’t the most appealing thing to open up in a city. First off, they don’t provide many jobs, and secondly, they’re usually a huge power hog. Apple’s new Oregon data center is thought to be powered on 31-megawatts of power, which is enough for 22,000 houses.

However, the project could bring short term construction jobs and significant boost in tax collection to the area. As a company grows, they of course need more servers to power their large array of products.